Astroblog: Geomagnetic Storm Warning (15-16 March)

Friday, March 15, 2013

Geomagnetic Storm Warning (15-16 March)

The Australian IPS has issued an active alert, with the possibility of minor geomagnetic storms in the next 24 hours from a Coronal Mass Ejection that will just brush past us.

A second M class flare has just occurred, but it is unclear if this has resulted in an Earth-Directed CME (UPDATE: yes, it has, should hit in 2-3 days).

People in Tasmania and Southern New Zealand should be on the alert for aurora from after astronomical twilight (about 1 and a a half hours after sunset) until the early morning of the 16th.

It is possible that Southern Victoria and Northern New Zealand will see aurora, but far less likely. Look to the south for unusual shifting glows.

And it is entirely possible than nothing at all will happen. Have a look for comet Lemmon low in the southern sky, while you are looking for aurora (comet PanSTARRS is long gone).
http://astroblogger.blogspot.com.au/2013/03/comets-c2011-l4-panstarrs-and-c2012-f6.html

Labels: aurora, Sun

# posted by Ian Musgrave @ 7:42 pm

Comments:

Hi Ian, i've been looking at your past blogs to do with Google sky etc, and you say that these images are 50+ years old and gave a link to go to the SDSS, but how does it say on that, that the dates range from 2005-2008 and these images were obtained by deep, multicolor images covering more than a quarter of the sky, so are these still the old images from 50+ years and just updated on the dates above, because 2008 was only 5 years ago, so maybe people could find 'new object's etc, as there is a big difference from 50+ to 2000-2008 years, and also data release date is 2012, so would google sky have any of these above images or do they still use the old ones, also can you tell me what date EPOCH 1996 is as I understand 1950 was the date of the film plate and 2000 was the updated co ordinates, so I can't work out what 1996 means but maybe it's just as it says. Thanks if you can help with this. Cheers

# posted by

Anonymous : 2:48 am

Sorry Ian, I meant to add to the questions above, that when people say that google sky gets updated images every couple of months is that not true either, or if it is, is it still the old images, and I read on an old answer from ask an astrobiologist that he said that they are old images too except the SDSS which is most recent, but does google use them also, this just seems a lot of confusion with it all, as videos i've seen on YouTube etc are people stating it's this object etc, but is it possible it could be due to the data from SDSS as thats most recent, I just got scared when that guy posted that video of the green glowing asteroid on YouTube from google sky but you had said it would of been tracked for the past 50 years but i'm wondering about that to do with the SDSS as if they images had been used it wouldn't be as old as 50+, sorry about all this.

# posted by

Anonymous : 5:01 am